LITR 5731 Seminar in Multicultural Literature

American Immigrant Literature
Kristin Hamon
24 June 2010 visit to LITR 5731 summer seminar

Thesis Discussion
Cesar Chavez, 1927-93

 

Experience in M.A. program

 

·       Finished with coursework

·       Classical rhetoric (oldies, but goodies!)

·       American Lit (Romantic and Realism) Hooray for extremes!

·       (Multi) Cultural studies are my favorite.

 

Experience at Chavez High School

 

·       Certified to teach 8-12, English, Speech, and ESL

·       Teaching Experience

o   9th Academic

o   10th Academic

o   11th AP Language and Composition and Academic

o   12th AP Literature and Composition and Enriched

o   ESL 9-12th and served as ESL Coordinator for a program of 300+ students

 

The authority with which I speak to you today is by no means my own.  Rather I am privileged and inspired to write this thesis on behalf of all of the students who so willingly and graciously shared their personal stories with me.

 

·       Variety in all of the stories and Dr. White’s immigrant literature class helped me question and think about the reasons for that variety – the land bridge between the United States and Mexico. The land bridge connecting Mexican American people with their homeland also offers a factual, physical claim to the otherwise elusive identity of the border or la frontera.

·       I write in order to expose and explain the poignant metaphor of the land bridge that not only seems to exist in Mexican American literature, but helps create identity from one narrative to the next.

 

 

 

Purpose

 

·       Redefining Mexican American narratives by the metaphor of the land bridge and its resulting border culture allows readers not only to feel these stories’ conflicted fears and yearnings but relate them to other, larger pulls across the American multicultural landscape.

 

·       Mexican American narratives that detail the ability to meet and overcome any obstacle are similar to the stories that historically defined America, yet the unique nature of their struggles speak for all people who meet confusion, frustration, and exploitation in ways that may not track the orthodox procession of earlier American Dreams.

 

·        In this vast and bewildering country of multicultural narratives, the unique voices of the Mexican American frontera, border, or land bridge may tell stories that develop yet connect our difference.

 

 

Read Introductory Thesis Pages Aloud

 

 

Points for Further Development

 

More reading! Comparing only two or three stories or authors would be easiest, but missing the point! The more narratives and authors I read, the better I can understand the metaphor of the land bridge.

 

Narrowing of topics – outlining individual points that crop up as a result of borderland identity and the land bridge

 

·       The minority narrative must be included and explained to better understand the variations in the immigrant narrative. Explain any momentary (or more permanent?) fusions of the two narratives.

o   Experiences corresponding to the oppression of non-immigrant minorities like African Americans and Native Americans typically appear as episodes in any immigrant’s story, but ultimately the immigrant and minority narratives cannot be lumped together because they start in separate relations to the United States’ dominant culture and ultimately arc in separate directions.

 

·       Other cultural narratives are able to rise out of the land bridge metaphor and borderland identity.

o   In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldúa uses the metaphor of the border to describe an identity characterized not by one name, place, or language but by a “lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture” that does not discriminate against “those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the ‘normal’” (Anzaldúa 3).

    • Juan Velasco explains the narrative power of the Chicano/a borderlands: “in this territory, [writing] becomes a celebration of ‘difference’ as opposed to uniformity… and Chicano/a autobiography rejects monolithic forms of thinking in order to emphasize process (crossing) and the continuous reconceptualization of identity” (323).

 

·       Identify and explain the various options for assimilation within a family and how it affects all generations (represent a few, although countless are present) because of the land bridge. Is there ever common ground?

    • The Mexican American narrative transforms from one individual, family or generation to the next. Constant movement and progression sustains the unique and powerful nature of the borderland identity. The border culture establishes and encourages adaptation within a traditional structure, empowering the Mexican American narrative as one that crosses—and to some degree reconciles—the immigrant and minority experience.
    • James P. Allen observes that, “having grown up in United States culture and society, the children of immigrants compare their status and prospects for economic advancement to those of other Americans, not to their parents’ lives in the old country” (16-17).

 

·       Relationship to the dominant culture (resistance or acceptance) as a means of understanding the “point of arrival” on the land bridge (if there is one?).

o   In rejecting the standard American Dream, for example, some first-generation immigrants reside in communities that form microcosms of their previous homes.

§  In The Labyrinth of Solitude, the great Mexican author Octavio Paz described a Mexican American community he observed in California: “This Mexicanism—delight in decorations, carelessness and pomp, negligence, passion and reserve—floats in the air. . . . [It] never mixes or unites with the other world, the North American world based on precision and efficiency” (13).

o   Between options to assimilate and adopt characteristics of the dominant culture or, in the manner of a minority group, to reject the dominant culture and remain isolated, even opposed, each generation may or may not follow the ancestral path created by previous generations.

 

·       Explain public vs. private identity as a way to uncover one’s occupied place (e.g. temporary, permanent, or a mixture?) on the land bridge.

o   Rodriguez’s concept of exchanging a private life for a very public identity and how the relationship to the land bridge pushes one towards or away from this concept

§  “But the bilingualists simplistically scorn the value and necessity of assimilation. They do not seem to realize that there are two ways a person is individualized. So they do not realize that while one suffers a diminished sense of private individuality by becoming assimilated into public society, such assimilation makes possible the achievement of public individuality” (Rodriguez 26).

o   For instance, children of immigrants often accept upward assimilation and selective acculturation, creating a path more similar to an archetypal immigrant culture.

§  For Richard Rodriguez, the resultant chasm between parent and child emerges after Mexican American children learn the English language. After learning English, he concedes, “gone was the desperate, urgent, intense feeling of being at home; rare was the experience of feeling [himself] individualized by family intimates” (Hunger 315). Rodriguez’s family “remained a loving family, but one greatly changed[,] . . . no longer bound tight by the pleasing and troubling knowledge of [their] public separateness” (315).

 

·       Explain the relationship of the Mexican American narrative as one that mirrors or rather supports a national narrative.

o   Study of any cultural group may benefit from an insistence on the shared ground yet different trajectories of immigrant and minority experiences and narratives. In this respect, the narratives of Mexican America offer the most undeniable claim on our attention to the USA’s changing multicultural landscape.